Editorial: Focus on criminals, not breaking up families

Published 12:24 pm, Thursday, January 18, 2018

A 33-year-old New Fairfield man, married to a U.S. citizen, father to their two small children, has worked the same job for a dozen years and pays taxes on the family’s home. By most measures, Joel Colindrés is a value to the community.

But the federal government still wants to send him back to Guatemala, a country he fled 14 years ago after a family member was murdered. When reporting for a weekly check-in with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Hartford, as he faithfully has done, he was told on Dec. 27 that his stay of deportation was over. He had to go.

Breaking up the family and sending Colindrés to Central America is of absolutely no benefit to society.

This hard-working father is hardly “bad hombres” material.

President Donald Trump, before he was elected, vowed to get rid of the “bad hombres,” violent criminals who come to this country illegally. Though we abhor his racially tinged choice of words, we do not disagree with deporting violent criminals who are here illegally.

But otherwise law-abiding residents who have made this country their home should not be the focus of ICE’s efforts.

Colindrés’ desperate situation is not, unfortunately, an anomaly in Connecticut.

In October, a 68-year-old West Hartford man, facing deportation to his native Indonesia, sought sanctuary in a Meriden church. He was among a handful of people last year turning to a sanctuary for protection, including Nury Chavarria, 34, a Norwalk mother of four who had fled the violence of Guatemala, 24 years earlier. Luis Barrios, a Derby father of four who has been in this country since 1992, was told to go back to Guatemala; Valent Kolami, of Prospect, a married father of two who has been here 18 years, faced deportation to Albania.

The list goes on. These undocumented residents have no criminal records. Most ran afoul of ICE through mistakes.

Since Trump became president, arrests of non-criminals comprised 26 percent of the 143,470 ICE arrests in fiscal year 2017 — “the greatest number of administrative arrests as compared with the past three fiscal years” — according to the annual ICE report, and a 30 percent increase from the previous year.

In Connecticut, 40 people have sought help from U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy in the past year to avoid deportation. The number likely does not reflect all who were ordered removed, nor those with criminal histories.

Colindrés, who turned himself in after escaping into Texas in 2004, missed a court date because officials used the wrong name and address. He has been trying to become a U.S. citizen; he is not a threat to the United States.

ICE is following orders, and those zealous orders have to change. It is a misuse of resources to spend time pursuing people with no criminal record. And it is morally wrong to break up families and send peaceful people back to countries they had fled for safety.